Category: Theology

An excellent column in First Things by Chrisopher Benson.  He explains how a non-universalistic reading of Karl Barth helps with the gap between the Scylla of universalism and the Charybdis of restrictivism.  If I have to have a view on all this, the neo-Barthian view that Benson sketches out seems the most tractable to me.  (As a side note, what a shame that FT editor Joe Carter cluttered up the comments with a mistaken and pinched argument about what an “evangelical” voice would say here as opposed to a “mainline” voice.  Somebody, please, rescue First Things and return it to its glory days of serious theological and social discourse!!)

Snippets from Benson:

The recent brouhaha over Rob Bell’s new book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, reminds me of why I’m not at home among exclusivists or universalists. If forced to choose, I would sit at the hearth of exclusivists any day of the week, as their message does a better job of cohering with the scandal of the gospel.

The universalist message, by contrast, conforms to “the pattern of this world” (Rom. 12:2), tickling the ears of all those who want to hear about how “a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross,” as theologian H. Richard Niebuhr observed 75 years ago in Kingdom of God in America.

What is the core claim of exclusivism? Catholic theologian Paul Griffiths answers: “belonging to the home religion is necessary for salvation. This . . . is to deny salvific efficacy to any alien religion. But it is not to assert salvific sufficiency to the home religion; exclusivists may or may not add to the core claim the view that belonging to the home religion is sufficient for salvation.” Those who add to the core claim are restrictivists. Those who relax their understanding of what it means to belong to the home religion are usually called inclusivists.

“Inclusivism is, in its deep logical structure, either simply a form of exclusivism or a position closely derived from it,” says Griffiths. ” Both positions answer the question of how religion provides an advantage to be had in no other way. Exclusivism . . . makes belonging to the home religion essential for salvation, but it also, in some of its variants, offers a relaxed understanding of what it might mean to belong to the home religion. Inclusivism in its most common form simply makes this relaxed understanding explicit by saying that consciously (publicly, explicitly) belonging to the home religion is not necessary for salvation.” I welcome inclusivism as a happy alternative to restrictivism and universalism.
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Exclusivists and universalists are presumptive demographers: The former claims hell is crowded and the latter that hell is empty. By contrast, inclusivists are agnostic about the population in hell, refusing to name and number the individuals who inhabit the place of torment. God alone keeps the statistics. There’s a family resemblance between exclusivists and inclusivists insofar as they both affirm the existence of hell and believe “there is salvation in no one else [Jesus Christ], for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). The feud relates to how this salvation gets worked out.

Exclusivists require a public and explicit confession of faith in Jesus Christ and a life marked by good fruit. Inclusivists acknowledge that faith and good fruit are hallmarks of Christ-followers, but are reluctant to make judgments about the destiny of ignorant or impossible souls, emphasizing that “with God all things are possible” (Mt. 19:26) and that “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). By “ignorant” I mean the unevangelized and by “impossible” I mean the unrepentant.

According to inclusivists, God’s rescue operation is for the entire cosmos (John 12:32, 2 Cor. 5:18-19, 1 Tim. 2:4). This doesn’t mean that all people are saved, as universalists claim, but that all are invited to the eternal banquet. People respond to the invitation with acceptance, rejection, or apathy. What happens to the rebels, fence sitters, and oblivious? While the Bible informs us that “the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor. 6:9-10) and specifically names “the works of the flesh” that bar admittance (Gal. 5:19-21), no Christian occupies the seat of judgment that belongs to God.

There may yet be opportunities, either in temporal life or postmortem life, where individuals can encounter and receive an optimal presentation of the Gospel, “not a mixed message of joy and terror, salvation and damnation,” as Karl Barth railed against in Church Dogmatics.

“In itself,” Barth said, “[the Gospel] is light and not darkness,” though he recognized it throws a shadow. Universalists err because they deny the shadow, as Bell’s sunny title—Love Wins—implies. If and when exclusivists err, it’s because they dim the light in their stinginess about God’s mercy. Each one of us responds to the light we have. Professing and practicing Christians respond to the light as if it’s high noon. Spiritual seekers respond to different intensities of light, as if the sun is rising or setting.

The inclusivist option has been embraced by John Wesley, C. S. Lewis, and Billy Graham. Hints of it can be found among some of the early church fathers and Reformers. I sense an inclusivist attitude in Athanasius and Karl Barth, who offer the contemporary church an ancient-future voice. For them, the key verse in understanding election is 2 Corinthians 5:14: “For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died” (emphasis added). All human beings are included in the death of Christ, not just potentially but actually. When someone comes to the Christian faith, it’s not a transition from being an outsider to an insider.

We’re all insiders—whether we realize it or not. Christians are simply awake to the reality of being already accepted in Jesus Christ. Barth rejects the false alternative between “all are saved” (Origen, Gregory of Nyssa) and “not all are saved” (Augustine, Calvin). All are saved insofar as the Christ event is efficacious for humanity, but how that gets worked out among individuals is entrusted to the perfect mercy and justice of God. Barth leaves the question about human destiny open in hope, a position that George Hunsinger calls “reverent agnosticism.”

[Barth] defines the existence of hell as a self-chosen place of separation from God. He also navigates a middle way between the exclusivist tendency to focus singularly on God’s righteousness and the universalist tendency to focus singularly on God’s mercy. Christ is at the center of Barth’s attention, descending into hell when we deserve to be there. His descent doesn’t empty hell of its occupants, all of whom lock the door from the inside, but it does show—without equivocation—that the Cross achieves plenitude of being and eternal peace for each one of us.

Tragically and unfathomably, individuals will elect against their own election in Christ, choosing poverty of being and eternal torment instead. Even though God has put us to rights, some don’t want to be “disentangled from the birdlime of concupiscence,” as Augustine puts it in Confesssions. We’re all invalids by the pool of Betheseda, but some will answer the perennial question of Jesus in the negative, “Do you want to be healed?” (John 5:6). No living person has undergone the descent of Christ into hell, and therefore we must never count who is there. What makes the hell-counters of Westboro Baptist Church so odious is that they feign the Cross’ knowledge without undergoing the Cross’ torture.

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We might even say the exclusivist is a Cassandra whose fire and brimstone vision overwhelms the wideness of God’s mercy, and the universalist is a Pangloss whose cheerfulness about humanity underestimates the exactitude of God’s justice. If the former preaches “Wrath Wins,” the latter declares “Love Wins.” Neither sermon gets it quite right, and that’s why we need to hear the inclusivist’s message of “Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God,” which preserves the dialectical tension in the Gospel: “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 6:23).

We cannot know the fate of every person who ever lived. For those impossible and ignorant souls, we’re better off adopting a posture of “reverent agnosticism” about their outcome rather than assign them to a circle of hell; otherwise we shall incur condemnation for usurping the seat of judgment from its rightful occupant.

The best and most thorough review of Love Wins that I’ve read is from Steven Holmes at St. Andrews.  Here are the mulitple and ever-growing parts of Holmes’ review:  Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7; Part 8; Part 9.  Holmes is an evangelical and a Calvinist.

If you are like me — you find the questions Bell raises legitimate and troubling, but you are concerned that the conversation requires much more nuance and weight theologically (and you cannot consider yourself a universalist) — read Holmes’ blogs.  Even if you are not a staunch Calvinist like Holmes (I’m not), you’ll find them refreshing.

Holmes is quite critical of various aspects of Bell’s arguments.  But for me some of the most important of Holmes’ observations are in Parts 2 and 5 of his review.  In Part 2, Holmes recites this quote from Bell:  

“A staggering number of people have been taught that a select few Christians will spend forever in a peaceful, joyous place called heaven, while the rest of humanity spends forever in torment and punishment in hell with no chance for anything better … This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus’s message (p. viii)”

Holmes analyzes the quote as follows:

This is a full-frontal attack on historic orthodoxy, isn’t it? Bell must be opposed, denounced, corrected, and bid farewell, because he has ceased to believe the gospel found in Scripture and taught by the church down the ages, and this paragraph is sufficient proof of that, surely? This proves that Bell is a heretic, right?

Wrong.

This is going to be a long discussion, because some historical detail is necessary. So let me state a conclusion as briefly and bluntly as I can: in saying this, Bell is saying nothing that has not been held by the vast majority of Christian theologians down the ages, taught explicitly by many of them, and repeatedly defended as Biblical by the most conservative scholars.

What is Bell actually saying, first? If we read the passage carefully, the core claim is about proportion: the offence is in the ‘select few’ who are saved – not the nature of heaven, nor the nature of hell, but in their relative populations. The message of God’s love demands that we hold that God saves many, or most, or all – that the gift of grace is not given parsimoniously. And this is not about the nature of hell, but about who God is – the claim of the book is that love wins.

The question of the relative populations of heaven and hell come the eschaton was asked quite frequently in the Reformed tradition. B.B. Warfield published an essay under the title ‘Are they few that be Saved?’ His argument was exegetical; his answer a resounding negative. In closing, he paused to point to others who held that the number of the saved would far outnumber the lost: R.L. Dabney; Charles Hodge; W.G.T. Shedd. I could add A.A. Hodge and Jonathan Edwards.

This is not a catalogue of woolly-minded liberals.

This was the united witness of Old Princeton, a position taken by at least two of the writers of The Fundamentals. These names are the very definition of Calvinist orthodoxy. These are the people whose respect for Scripture was such that they developed and defined the doctrine of inerrancy. These are the people with whom Bell is agreeing.

And when you burrow in to what they actually said, the point becomes more striking still. Charles Hodge calls the number of the lost ‘very inconsiderable’ on the last page of his Systematic Theology. Shedd actually suggests that the error of believing that only a few are saved is equal and opposite to the error of universalism. That’s Shedd, the Calvinist’s Calvinist, asserting that the point Bell writes to oppose is a grave heresy – albeit one that seems presently to be being vigorously defended by all manner of men (they do all seem to be men…) whose zeal, unfortunately, apparently far outweighs their knowledge.

(Warfield does point to one Reformed writer who holds that the number of the saved will be few, Johann Heidegger….)

Holmes returns to this discussion in Part 5:

Remember Johann Heidegger from a couple of posts back? He was the Reformed writer who held that the number of the saved would indeed be small. Shedd and Warfield condemn him for being far too conservative in his theology. Heidegger wrote about precisely this question, and said this:

“No one except those who sin unto death ought to or can determine anything certain before the end of life, concerning the eternal reprobation of himself or of others. Of others indeed we must have good hopes by the judgement of love, 1. Cor.13:7 (beareth, believeth, hopeth, endureth all things)…  (q. ET from Heppe, p. 188, with error silently corrected).”

Let’s do a kind of scale of theological conservatism here, shall we? Shedd and Warfield are conservative – I believe that will be generally granted. They reprove Heidegger for being far too conservative. That makes him, what? Ultra-conservative? Heidegger then rejects as far too conservative the position that we can know for certain that any other human being is damned. We’re somewhere off the scale now, in the company of those who think the Taliban are dangerously liberal. I have thought hard about anyone in the Christian tradition who held to this position, that we can know for certain that a particular person is in hell. There were, to be fair, some Landmarkian Baptists. And Dante, I suppose, although he might claim his allegory was not meant to be taken like that. Certainly, there are not many.

And yet when Bell doesn’t even say that this is wrong, but merely questions whether it is right, we are told that he has committed an error so grave that he must be publicly castigated.

I can’t quite decide whether this is simply brilliant debating work from Bell, enticing his opponents to defend a position so extreme that no one in their right mind would touch it, or whether his opponents really, genuinely, don’t realise just how far behind they have left anything resembling historic orthodoxy.

This is not mere theological hair-splitting.  This point is pastorally vital. Bell’s other example concerns an atheist teenager, killed in a car crash. ‘There’s no hope, then,’ comes the comment, reflecting this ridiculously extreme position. All of us who are Christian pastors have performed funeral services for those with no visible faith, and have been offered care and counsel to those, actively Christian or not, who have lost an apparently-unbelieving family member or friend. The first rule of such pastoral engagement has always been not to speculate about the fate of the dead person. One speaks with confidence the promises of Jesus, proclaims the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead, announces with utter conviction the defeat of death and sin and hell in the cross, and invites, implicitly or explicitly, the hearers to place their own faith and trust in these realities. The one who has died is in God’s hands, and it is not for us to judge. The gospel of Jesus is never, ever, ‘there’s no hope, then.’

This point is utterly vital, and Bell is simply right.

Mark Galli’s column in Christianity Today this afternoon is titled “The Problem With Christus Victor.”  To his credit, he acknowledges that the substitutionary atonement model can be presented in incorrect ways and that Christus Victor is also a Biblical model.  But his conclusion, it seems to me, is odd, to say the least:

Here, I’m simply suggesting that Christus Victor may not be a theory that Protestants, and evangelicals in particular, should tie their wagons to. While it brings to the fore some crucial and forgotten biblical truths, it’s clearly a secondary atonement theme in the New Testament. And at least for today’s Protestants, it has an uncanny tendency to downplay a sense of personal responsibility, which in the end, sabotages grace. In my view, more than ever in our day, we need Christus Vicarious.

Sigh.

Christus Victor is a “secondary atonment theme in the New Testament?”  I don’t read it that way at all!  From Matthew to Revelation a central theme of the New Testament, perhaps the central theme against its cultural background, is the victory of Jesus Christ over the powers of sin, death, and empire.

Now, Galli might be correct that if we collect specific proof texts that deal specifically with the cross, the preponderance talk about substitution.  And he is certainly correct that Christus Victor should not be advanced “at the expense of” substitution.  But the suggestion that any one facet of the atonement is a “minor theme” or that protestants or evangelicals should emphasize any one theme over another is not helpful. 

Worse, Galli makes no effort at theological discernment beyond this half-hearted weighing of proof texts.  How did the Fathers understand the atonement?  What themes have been important in the history of the Church universal?  Are there theologians working today who are synthesizing Christus Victor, substition, and other atonement models?  Galli doesn’t say.  (The early Fathers emphasized Christus Victory heavily; Anselm’s version of penal substition is important but comes later; see, e.g., Hans Boersma’s Violence, Hospitality and the Cross:  Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition).

Worse yet, Galli casts this as a peculiar question for “protestants” and “evangelicals” (whatever that latter term means nowadays).  Why should anyone care about these silos anymore?  Break them down and let’s understand once again that “Christus Victor” and “penal substitution” are just human terms for grasping at complementary aspects of the cosmic mystery of the cross.

For good measure, here is another short essay by Bauckham, on “Heaven.”

In another of these essays I wrote about the decline in belief in life after death in contemporary western society, and suggested some reasons for this. I did not then give much attention to the question: what is it that Christians hope for after death?

To think about heaven we need imaginative pictures. We cannot expect to know in literal terms what heaven will be like. Attempts to describe it literally are usually banal, and easily provoke the response: why should I want that? Who wants to spend eternity sitting on a cloud playing a harp? Heaven must be inconceivably different from our experience here and now. So we need pictures that evoke a sense of something that far transcends this life.

The Bible and the Christian tradition offer us three main pictures of what heaven is all about. If we put these three symbols together, we shall get quite a good idea of what the Christian understanding of human destiny is.

The first is the hope of the vision of God. “Blessed are the pure in heart,” said Jesus, “for they shall see God.” God, whom we now know so imperfectly, we shall then experience directly. We shall enjoy him as the ultimate fulfilment of all human desires. We shall worship him with the kind of rapturous attention that a powerful experience of beauty or love can evoke in us in this life. Because God is infinite and we were made to enjoy him, heaven’s joys will never be exhausted. We shall find eternal fulfilment in God.

But heaven will not be just me and God. God made us to find fulfilment in each other as well as in him. So the second picture of heaven is the city of God, a perfect human society, in which all our dreams of really adequate human relationships will be fulfilled.

The book of Revelation, in its great vision of the New Jerusalem, which is the Bible’s fullest account of heaven, combines these two symbols in a picture of the city in which God himself will dwell with humanity. It will be a perfect human society because it will be centred on God.

But God’s purposes reach beyond even a human society finding its true fulfilment in him. They extend to God’s whole creation. Our third picture of heaven, the kingdom of God, is the broadest. It looks for the time when God’s rule over his whole creation will finally be perfected. All evil, suffering and death will be overcome. God’s world will be as he has always intended it to be. And when all the evils and imperfections hat obscure God in the world as it now is have been transcended, then all creation will perfectly reflect God’s glory. As the apostle Paul put it, “God will be all in all.”

So the Christian hope is that the whole of God’s creation will find its eternal destiny in God. Although, up till now, I’ve used the term “heaven” to refer to the

Christian hope of life after death, because this is usually done, we can now see that this term can be rather misleading. It might suggest that our destiny is to leave the world behind and join God in some otherworldly, purely spiritual heaven. The Christian hope is much better than that. It is for the union of heaven and earth, for God’s transforming presence throughout his creation.

All this should widen our horizons beyond the narrowly individual terms in which we so often think of heaven. Our hope as individuals is to share in God’s great triumph over all evil and death, to have a place in his cosmic purpose for the whole creation, to find our own fulfilment in God in the context of a world centred on God and transfigured by his glory. But, since this is what heaven is all about, of course we cannot hope to share that destiny unless we place ourselves now, as individuals, within God’s purpose for his world. To enjoy the vision of God then we must begin to centre our lives on God now. To enter the city of God then, we must seek his will for human society now. To enter the kingdom of God then, we must place ourselves under God’s rule now and seek his kingdom in all reality.

Richard Bauckham is one of the biblical scholars and theologians for whom I have the foremost respect.  Perusing his nice personal website during lunch today, I found this little essay of his on Hell.  It is excellent and I reproduce it below.

Early in 1996 a report by the Doctrine Commission of the Church of England was published. It was a book (called The Mystery of Salvation) on the Christian understanding of salvation. The coverage in the national press was largely confined to one paragraph within this book of over 200 pages: the paragraph about hell. Typical headlines in the press were: “The Church’s empty hell” – “Church elders pour cold water on hellfire and damnation” – “We believe in Hell, says the Church (but without the flames).”

This was a surprise to the authors of the report, who had thought the paragraph about hell fairly uncontroversial. In any case it was a very small part of their report, which dealt at length with many other more topical issues, such as feminism and the church’s attitude to non-Christian faiths, which they would not have been surprised to find proving controversial.

Much of the report is a sustained attempt to make the Christian understanding of salvation relevant and meaningful in the context of contemporary British life and society. The national media were not interested in this. For them, salvation means escaping hellfire when you die, and so the only point worth noticing in the report was the suggestion that the church was abandoning its traditional picture of fire and brimstone as the fate of the damned.

In fact the report wants hell to be taken seriously. But hell is nothing more than not attaining salvation. It cannot be understood as something positive in itself. It only makes sense as a negative: not being saved. Salvation is not avoiding hell; rather hell is missing out on salvation. So hell cannot be understood without a fully Christian and thoroughly positive understanding of salvation.

There are many Christian ways of describing salvation. One way the Doctrine Commission report adopts is: Salvation is experiencing the One who is the Source and Goal of all things as the Source and Goal of one’s own being and living. Salvation means, in the last resort, finding one’s fulfilment as a human being in God. Human beings are made to find fulfilment ultimately only in God. Salvation, both now and after death, is in knowing God.

If this is the destiny for which God has made us, hell cannot be a kind of parallel, alternative destiny. Hell is the result of refusing the one destiny for which we were made and the only way in which human life can find eternal fulfilment. It is a real and terrible possibility that human beings can refuse the destiny for which they were made. This belongs to the utter seriousness with which God takes the freedom he has given us.

We cannot say dogmatically whether in the end anyone will choose hell. But hell is an absolutely serious possibility of which people must be warned. No one should suppose that while refusing to know God now, they can always change their mind later. As in all areas of life, our choices now may limit the choices we can make in the future.

The New Testament uses a variety of different pictures to describe hell: fire is one of them, destruction another, exclusion from the presence of God another. Burning in fire for eternity is the picture which got fixed in much traditional teaching about hell as though it were a literal description. The New Testament does not require us to think of hell in this way. Hell is not an eternal chamber of horrors across the way from heaven. Hell is the fate of those who reject God’s love. God’s love cannot compel them to find their fulfilment in God, but there is no other way they can find fulfilment. They exclude themselves from the Source of all being and life.

The Rob Bell dust up has caused me to think quite a bit about theological method.  There was a comment I notice on one blog that suggested Bell should be “excommunicated.”  In stark contrast, another blogger wondered why anyone but the elders in Bell’s own church should have anything to say about the matter.  Much of the commentary has focused on whether Bell’s book is “orthodox.”  Who’s to say?  I suspect that this question, more than anything else, is what is causing such hand-wringing in evangelical circles.

I have many books on my shelves specifically about the sources of doctrine, none of which completely agree with each other.  Every systematic theology begins with a prolegomena on method and sources.  I have many of these on my shelves as well — some of which are heavy enough to kill a horse — and none of these fully agree with each other either.

For example, I have been reading Cardinal Newman’s Essay on the Development of Doctrine, which is a splendid argument for the historic consistency of Catholic doctrine rooted in scripture and the Western Christian tradition.  But then I have an alternate version of the nature and scope of the early tradition in some Eastern Orthodox texts.  On the side of the Reformation, I have Barth’s Church Dogmatics, which roots authority in contemporaneously received revelation; Bloesch’s Essentials of Evangelical Theology, which takes a more stable view of scripture than Barth while retaining Barth’s (and the Reformers’) emphasis on subjective certainty; Trevor Hart’s Faith Thinking, which includes the Christian tradition, broadly construed, as a touchstone, but not an irreformable source; Braaten and Jenson’s Christian Dogmatics, which views both scripture and tradition through the eyes of Luther and Barth; Stanley Grenz’s Theology for the Community of God, which pushes scripture and tradition a little further than Bloesch or Hart but places lots of weight on community; sources touting “paleo-orthodoxy” and the “Vincentian Canon” from the likes of Thomes Oden and Gerald Bray; and Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology, which locates final authority solely in a totally inerrant Biblical text (without really explaining, incidentally, the tradition that bequeathed to us the scriptural canon).  And these are just a sample.  I have many more, and there are yet many others I don’t own or haven’t read.

If you were to ask the authors of these volumes whether Bell’s book is “orthodox,” they would not agree with each other.  Some of them (Bloesch and Hart) have written things about eschatology that sound very much like what Bell has written.  Some (Catholic and Orthodox) represent traditions in which there are a variety of contemporary opinions on eschatology, often with equally vituperative accusations flying back and forth.  Some would cite “church tradition” to condemn Bell’s views while at the same time rejecting things that others think are equally “traditional” and equally represented in early Church teaching (such as the primacy of the Roman Bishop, for example, or Mary’s perpetual virginity, or the real presence in the Eucharist).  Some would condemn Bell supposedly solely based on what the Bible teaches, while others might uphold his orthodoxy on exactly the same grounds.

All of this is existentially unsettling for those of us in the evangelical tradition because the truth is that we do not have a tradition capable of sustained reflection on the sorts of questions Bell raises.  We might argue solely from scripture, but scripture can be read in various ways — all of which reflect some tradition of reading.  We might appeal to a presumed consensus tradition, but we can’t explain why we choose some portions of tradition as authoritative and consensual and reject others.  We can appeal to a broad sense of “orthodoxy” rooted in scripture, the early Church, the Reformation, and pietism — this is Richard Mouw’s approach — but that tends to make the term a wax nose.

I’m not sure where this leaves me personally.  I’m realizing that theological method really is one of the main things I’ve been interested in all along.  As far as I can tell, at some point you resonate with and stake a claim to a certain sort of method and go with it as best you can.  It seems to me that this is a place at which each person must rely on the Holy Spirit, trust in God’s mercy, and remain generous with others.  But it seeming that way to me, of course, already presupposes a certain sort of method!  And that, I think, is our real dilemma.

As [Jesus] approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes.  The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you.”  (Luke 19: 41-44)

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.  (Matt. 23:37)

Much of the conversation about judgment and justice in recent weeks has focused on the question whether God “gets what He wants.”  We know that God “wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.”  (1 Tim. 2:4).  God’s desire for us, His pursuit of us despite our rebellion, is a pervasive theme in scripture.  It’s something we need to recall again and again and again.  It is why, I think, Jesus weeps over Jerusalem in the story of the Triumphal Entry.

A pastor at my former Church would preach on this passage on Palm Sunday, but he referred to it as the Tragic Entry.  I think he was right.  Jesus foresees destruction for God’s beloved city — a destruction accomplished by the Roman Emperor Titus not too long after Jesus’ death and resurrection.  And Jesus weeps because the “abode of peace” (Jeru-Salem) failed to recognize the Prince of Peace.

Did God “want” the Romans to destroy Jerusalem?  Not according to Jesus.  He wanted to surround the city with protection.  But they “were not willing,” and eventually they were destroyed.

An easy lesson we could draw from this episode is that God allows us the freedom to choose what we want.  Do we want God’s protection or do we choose a path that leads to destruction? 

This might be a bit too easy.  Left to our own choices, would any of us choose God?  That possibility is something that the Apostle Paul, reflecting on the Jewish scriptures, seemed to consider impossible:

There is no one righteous, not even one;
there is no one who understands,
no one who seeks God.  (Rom. 3:11)

So does God get what He wants, or does He let us choose for ourselves even if it is not what He wants?  The right answer seems to be “Yes” on both counts.  The Biblical witness emphasizes both God’s sovereignty and human free will.  It offers no systematic harmonization of this tension.

I suspect the scriptures allow this tension to lie open in part because the question of what God “wants” or of what any human person or human culture “wants” is irreducibly complex.  Most of us are unable even to penetrate the deepest recesses of our own desires.  Very often, we don’t know what we “want,” or we deceive ourselves about what we want to think we “want.” 

We know that God “wants all people to be saved,” but we also know that this is not all God wants.  He wants people to be free.  He wants justice.  He wants to expose and strip away evil until the good alone remains.  He wants the fellowship of His perichoretic love, unimposed and uncoerced, to be “all in all.”  God will get what He wants, but what He wants contains more than one element.  The entirety of it can’t be isolated to one passage from scripture — perhaps it can’t ultimately be isolated at all.